CLAY: We begin with more covid authoritarianism. We finished yesterday’s show talking about the city of Los Angeles joining New York City and mandating covid vaccine passports. If you’re going to a bar, you’re going to a restaurant, if you’re going to your gym, if you’re going to a sporting event — basically wherever you might be going — they are going to require that you show a covid vaccine passport in order to enter those establishments.

That’s not enough, by the way. It never is enough as the continued creep of authoritarianism extends across the country even as we are now 19 months into the covid insanity. And now former CDC Planned Parenthood director I think, Leana Wen, she is basically leading the charge on CNN on a regular basis. I want you to listen to what she said about needing vaccine passports for travel and — according to her, according to Dr. Wen — if you’re not willing to get vaccinated, well, guess what? You don’t get to see your family. Let’s play cut 3.

REPORTER: Should the U.S. be more like Canada?

WEN: Yes, we should. We really need every tool at our disposal at this point! We’ve already tried incentives. We tried outreach and education. We should continue doing that. But at this point vaccine requirements are the way to go. Vaccine requirements in workplaces, as we’ve seen, have been very effective.

I also think that for domestic travel, for interstate travel — for planes, trains, interstate buses, things that are within the jurisdiction of President Biden as the federal government — I really do think that it’s time to put those requirements, too, especially with holidays coming. It will be a powerful incentive for people to say, “Look, you can stay unvaccinated if you want, but you’re not going to be able to travel to see your family.”

BUCK: This has been the game all along, Clay. They have been pretending that it was supposed to be, “We’re gonna make the case to you but we’re gonna leave it up to you.” But in reality — and I believe this has always really been the plan. I think anybody who understands what we’re dealing with here — whether it’s Leana Wen, the Biden administration, Joe Biden himself; certainly, Dr. Fauci — these individuals have all had in the back of their minds:

“We’re gonna ask you, we’re going to encourage, and then we’re going to make you.” That’s been the game all along. And when you look at the incrementalism here, it never goes in the other direction, really, when they think there is the political momentum on their side to push even more. They never stop and say, “Okay, Democrats, the left want further restriction, but the data doesn’t really support that so we’re going to take it back in the other direction.”

The most perfect example of this would be remember how there was that whole furor out of Florida because they were like, “Oh, my gosh! Ron DeSantis is experimenting in child sacrifice,” because they were allowing. They weren’t even banning masks in schools. They were allowing the opt-out for children based on parental decision-making in schools —

CLAY: They lost that distinction, too.

BUCK: Yeah. They completely ignored it. They pretended like you weren’t allowed to have your kid wearing a mask in school which was not the policy. And now we have actual data to show — and they were worried about this. We talked about it. They didn’t want there to be a control group. They didn’t want to have schools with mask mandates and schools without them. We have the data, and who is going to be surprised to find out that masks didn’t make a damn bit of difference for kids in schools in any meaningful way? They can’t even really measure the distinction.

CLAY: And I’ll give some of that data. This is from the state of Florida: “New covid cases for kids ages 5 to 17 have decreased 79% in the month of September.” Now, this is a big deal, obviously, because everybody in Florida is in school by the month of September, right, all the kids? So covid cases overall among 5- to 17-year-olds…

Remember, teachers unions and the Biden administration, they’ve all been selling this fiction that when kids going to be school, everyone is in danger; that teachers are on the front line. Remember all those stories that CNN and MSNBC ran about teachers doing their wills as they got ready to go back into school and teach and all that absurdity.

“In the 54 Florida counties where school districts have no masking policy or are following state law by honoring the parental opt-out rule, covid cases declined 79%. In the 13 school districts that imposed forced masking, the cases declined 77% on average.” So virtually no difference statistically. In fact, the places where kids were not wearing the masks, the number of cases actually declined more, by 79 versus 77.

And then you go to, “Okay, well, let’s look at the overall positivity rate here.” There’s no difference at all, either, in the overall positivity rate for the districts there overall. So not just for kids, but overall, for adults as well. So the idea, again: Down 65% where no masks were required; down 67% where masks were required. There’s no difference. Masks do not work. They do not have any impact. It is cosmetic theater.

And to your point, Buck, this is why Ron DeSantis and Florida is so threatening to the Fauciites, because they want there to be an action taken that they can say, “See? This is why we beat covid.” But when you acknowledge that nothing (chuckles) we do changes anything — and, by the way, Florida is rapidly approaching the lowest rate of covid infection anywhere in the country now as the Delta variant has burned out down there.

I think only five states have a lower covid rate than Florida right now, yet it’s not be talked about hardly anywhere other than a few places like this. And, Buck, this is what they were afraid of, because it totally blows up distancing, mask mandates, the idea that you can’t live a normal life.

BUCK: What do they know that, for example, the United Kingdom does not know where they do not require masks in schools? You have to wonder: “At what point does it become clear that these are, at a minimum, judgment calls that are being made?” We have been lied to for a long time now by people who claim to be scientists but they’re really politicians who once studied science in an academic setting.

People like Fauci, he’s like, “Oh, I’m a physician.” Right. Sure. Fauci hasn’t seen a patient. Give me a break. This is not a guy who’s on the front line of dealing with day-to-day medical realities of patients. And they’ve been saying this stuff like there’s no alternative point of view. But in reality, there obviously is an alternative point of view based upon the data and what has been happening here.

And when you see what’s going on in Florida… You know the answer they’re giving now as to why the Florida cases have dropped down so substantially is, “Oh. Well, Florida had such a bad surge over the summer that it’s like everybody…” I guarantee you they’re not gonna be saying, “Everybody got sick who was gonna get sick” if the virus starts to spread again in the wintertime.

And they’re certainly not focusing in as much on states like Massachusetts, Vermont that are in the midst of a big covid case surge right now. They’re certainly not taking any time to step back and say, “Hold a second. How can we have so many people vaccinated and so many people with natural immunity at this point and some states are still setting records?

They don’t have answers to these things other than… When Dr. Leana Wen, to go back to that — and she was like the head of Planned Parenthood, the president of Planned Parenthood, which is shocking and tells you all you need to know about her moral character. But when she says something like, “We need to keep people away from their families over the holidays if they’re unvaccinated,” you have to wonder.

What would she not be willing to go along with or to mandate for people? If the CNN anchor brought her on and said, “I think we should gather up all the unvaccinated and just make them all go to one place in the middle of the woods until they’re willing to get a shot for public safety,” would she say “no” to that? I’m not sure she would.

CLAY: It’s a great question that you’re pointing out, which is these zealots on the far end of lockdowns and restrictions and masking and all these things. What is something that could be suggested that they would say, “You know what? That’s too much.” I don’t remember a person like Dr. Wen ever saying, “No, this is too much.”

By the way, Buck, most recent data from Florida: Florida is down 55% the number of people who have covid, right? Only Louisiana, Hawaii, California, and Connecticut have a lower current rate of covid in the entire country than Florida. I’m looking at the most recent New York Times by-state data.

Data from Florida schools both with and without mask mandates shows that masks on kids make no difference inside schools when it comes to covid cases. If science truly mattered no kids would be wearing masks in schools anywhere in America. pic.twitter.com/ytZfLlEwEJ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 7, 2021

And there’s almost an indistinguishable difference, the cases per a hundred thousand. Florida has 19. Louisiana has 18. Hawaii, 17. California, 17. So Florida is about to be the least covid infected state in the entire country. How many people listening right now have seen that story told in the media?

BUCK: And why is it that whenever there is any discussion of Florida — I just saw something — it’s always an attack (at CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times), somehow, on Ron DeSantis, even if they have to entirely fabricate it? Because it just goes to show you instead of looking at Florida as an experiment that even the Fauciites and the Democrats could learn from, right?

They should be looking at this saying, “How does this go? How is this actually playing out? And maybe we should adjust based upon the reality of someone taking a different approach.” You often bring up federalism. This is a version of looking at federalism as an opportunity for a better way forward with covid.

CLAY: It’s what the state laboratories were supposed to be!

BUCK: And instead, what they do is they look at Florida, they ignore anything that does not fit their narrative and even go beyond that to fabricate attack narratives about Ron DeSantis personally, because he’s a political threat to them. Because their ultimate goal here is, more than anything else, to retain power, right? They figure that they’ll do a better job with covid no matter what, as long as they’re in power; the data be damned. And that’s I think their approach and continues to be their approach.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: What policy would be too crazy for the lockdowners? Where will Fauciites draw the line? I think those are important questions to ask. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. We’re just talking about Dr. Leana Wen, formerly chief of Planned Parenthood and now a frequent guest on CNN, one of the Blue Check Brigade that goes on TV to tell you that you have no individual rights, really.

That it’s all subject to the whims of the collective as vocalized and implemented by Democrat activists in the federal government, places like the CDC. And we see people wearing masks outside still as a show of political allegiance. We’re told to mask up between bites on airplanes. There’s a lot of stupidity out there. It’s very obvious.

You see it; you know it; you’re aware of it. And yet they act like you’re the crazy one. Well, I ask you: What would be a little too extreme? There are schools… I know people who are in grad school right now — law school, business school — and they say that the campuses are requiring not only vaccination but weekly testing. Well, what about the rest of us?

We’re a country with over 60% now vaccination for adults. We’ll talk. Clay’s gonna lead us into a discussion in a moment here about how they’re coming for your kids with the shots. Get ready for it. Not everywhere, but a lot of places. Or they’re gonna say you can’t be in school. That’s happening.

We told you that was gonna happen weeks ago. But now we also have the test-and-trace mentality coming back. We can find out who has all the cases. Here is CNN’s favorite blue check doc on TV telling everything that every American should get tested. How frequently? Well, here you go.

WEN: If we have frequent testing that’s widespread combined also with vaccination and with early treatment, that is how we can get covid under control and turn it from the potential of a deadly disease into something that actually is manageable. But we really need scaled-up testing.

So I commend the Biden administration for this step. But what they really — what I really want to see them do is to say, “We’re gonna put as much effort into testing as we did around vaccines, so that every American is going to be able to get tested at least twice a week, and those tests will be free.”

BUCK: Twice a week, Clay. You and I — who have already had covid — are gonna get tested twice a week?

CLAY: And the tests are gonna be free? No, they’re not. Taxpayers are gonna pay for them. I can’t stop… I’m so tired of everybody telling us that everything the government provides is “free.” It’s never free! Everyone pays. We’re all paying for it. You just don’t recognize it. I didn’t want to get into this too, this the inflation craziness, Buck.

Leana Wen is obviously an imbecile, but it’s reflective of a fundamental misunderstanding of how economics work. There’s a story out there, Buck, that inflation — which is so bad right now at 5% — it’s adding $175 a month in cost to the average American household. So Biden keeps talking about how he’s not going to have any taxes that happen he puts on people.

That’s nearly two grand, roughly, that every American family is getting taken out of their pocket just based on his broken economic policies. And when you’re telling everybody out there… Oh, first of all, the testing is unnecessary. Twice a week for everybody for a virus that has a 99.8% survival rate? It’s crazy.